I recently bumped up against a Proof-Of-Concept where "Two MPP Powerhouses went Toe-To-Toe" - and I was fairly excited to see that there might be a contender in the ring, stalking the PureData Analytics/Netezza machine. These POC's are always fun to watch. I am sure not quite as gratuitous as gladiators in the Colosseum, but engaging nonetheless.

In this corner...

The contender, dressed in white, was an MPP, er - clustered servers posing as an MPP. Now let's level-set on what an MPP is, and what it is not.

As we can see with the above high intensity graphics - 6 - 2 Cylinder Fiats versus a 12-Cylinger Jag. Now here's the trick question so don't be shy: Which one really accelerates to close the distance faster? Take your time, I'll be right here.

It's no mystery that orchestrated, optimized and purpose-built hardware beats general-purpose commodity hardware every time it's tried. The contender was a cluster of commodity servers posing as an MPP. When we tried to launch scanning analytic queries on it, we could practically hear the whirrrrr-click of the machines as they quietly, well, went silent. For a very long time. I wondered if they would ever offer up the answer. Unlike the Hitchhiker's Guide where they had to wait a million years to get the answer to the ultimate question, we decided to kick off the same query on the PureData/Netezza machine.

I hit the "enter' button while I was standing at the keyboard, then recalled that I needed to check on something else and lowered myself into the chair, but before I could sit - Netezza had the answer. No, it wasn't "42" but something a bit more actionable.

We left the bulding that day satisfied that the Jaguar had in fact smoked the competition. I probably should mention that even as we left the building, the "other guys" still had not come back with an answer. Sad indeed.

Scalability for scanning/bulk operations is a result of strong architecture. It cannot be cobbled together with general-purpose parts. The cluster of servers posing as an MPP had failed. Cluster Failure. Send it back.